Menlo Park City Council - Please make the necessary moves to eventually eliminate natural gas. Natural gas during combustion and direct leaking is a very powerful greenhouse gas and contributes to the major changes we have had in climate over the last half a century.
The heat waves in the Northwest a month ago were formed by a climate-change induced "heat dome." The heat wave caused deaths of several thousand. In future years such an event might actually come directly to our region. The list of impacts from climate change is fearfully long. The predictions from the IPCC reports over the decades have been notoriously wrong - they have UNDERESTIMATED the impacts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. We are losing forest to wildfires much sooner and faster than anyone had projected.
I understand that moving from natural gas heating to electricity will cause painful disruptions for many. As a nation we have made many transitions. We started as a primarily agrarian society, then moved to becoming a primarily manufacturing society, and are currently a service-oriented society. There will be jobs in an electrified world. No doubt about that. There will be jobs in making the transition.
I lived in Menlo Park in the 70s while getting my doctorate in physics at Stanford. I was proud of this small linkage to your city when you became one of the first to develop the reach codes. Please continue in that tradition for my grandchildren.
Thanks, Gary
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Fight for Renewable Energies! Save the global ecology; create jobs; eliminate dependence on foreign oil; reduce military requirements
Gary Latshaw, Ph.D.
408-499-3006
